Autonomous cyber agents: rules for collaboration and concurrency

Any program, machine or person engaged in computer-enabled work is a cyber agent. Can such agents be made collaborate effectively? Both empirical evidence and theory suggest that there are simple rules for designing certain problem-solving organizations, called asynchronous teams, in which collaboration is automatic and scale-effective (adding cyber agents tends to improve solution-quality, and adding computers tends to improve solution-speed). The paper develops some of these rules